Warren Zevon: Bad Luck Streak In Dancing School : Music Reviews : Rolling Stone

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There's a sense of resolution. Not a solution so much as an unburdening, a reckoning with secrets that, revealed, can be swapped, like a pawn ticket, for some kind of stopgap redemption. Or a start toward it anyhow – a beginning: "Swear to God I'll change," the singer says in the title tune. No wonder Warren Zevon's dedicated this fine new album to detective novelist Ken Millar, who writes under the pen name Ross Macdonald.

Zevon's first Asylum LP, Warren Zevon (1976), and 1978's Excitable Boy were filled with tension, tough romance and a wild, charging spirit that led its own mad march. When Johnny struck up the band, that's what you'd hear. Music that sounded shrewd and satirical and a little sinister, songs sung by a smiler with a knife. Stories about characters who can best be seen in the half-light. Love songs without much hope. Protagonists who've been worn out or shot down or, like that excitable boy, bent out of shape and left playing with broken toys in the attic. These compositions were notably short on half-measures: they never backed off. They sounded tough, smelled sulfurous. Once in a while, you even caught a whiff of self-immolation.

This toughness of Zevon's, as well as his highly literate recklessness and affection for characters with long guns and nagging consciences, set people to thinking about his kinship with writers of fiction that has been called "hard-boiled," as if it were a quick breakfast order in a one-arm joint. Hardboiled: the word has a kind of visceral accuracy, a smart, vintage sound. And, with a few contemporary modifications, it suits Warren Zevon pretty well.

When Zevon's numbers are funny, they cut like a good Philip Marlowe wisecrack, and his evocations of Los Angeles, snappy and spare and full of nightshade, are as vivid as any of Marlowe's reveries when Raymond Chandler's private eye stares out his grimy office window at Hollywood. Some of Zevon's narratives have the fleet, seemingly dispassionate tone of Dashiell Hammett, and, on Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School, the singer's account of a team of mercenaries ("Jungle Work") boasts the gunmetal gleam of Hammett's Red Harvest. The edgy self-examination of such old songs as "Mama Couldn't Be Persuaded" and "Accidentally like a Martyr," or a new one like "Empty-Handed Heart," comes straight from Ross Macdonald, who once had a character say: "My husband has been looking for his father for some time and gradually breaking up. Or maybe...he's been looking for his father in the hope that it would put him back together."

There's a spiritual connection between Zevon and Macdonald–and a personal one as well–but this isn't the time or the place to go into that. For now, it's simply important to know that the ties, one way or another, are strong–a fact you'd discover just as readily by reading Macdonald's The Zebra-Striped Hearse and listening to "Wild Age," the cut that ends Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School like an envoi.

"Wild Age" is a sort of brass-knuckles version of Bob Dylan's "Forever Young," and in it, you can hear a lot of fast moving down rough roads. The song starts off like another hitch along that route: a somewhat wistful, halfway-sentimental evocation of the "restless" teenage-outlaw years, complete with harmonies by a couple of Eagles ("And the law can't stop 'em No one can stop 'em/At the wild age"). "Wild Age" soars – Warren Zevon writes some of the richest melodies in rock & roll, and some of the fiercest–but he lyrics seem to weight it down until the singer gets to the last verse and you realize you've been set up. The effect is like one of those amusement-arcade portraits sealed in plastic. You tilt it, and a skull shimmers out from under a face. Instead of "restless," Zevon substitutes "reckless," and he passes along a last thought like someone who's just wised up and pulled out of a life-or-death contest: "Mostly when the reckless years end Something's left to save Some of them keep running 'Til they run straight in their graves." It's the setup and the change-up that keep the composition from being a sermon. That, and the impression that these are the words of a proud survivor. If Ross Macdonald's Lew Archer ever wrote a song, it would sound a lot like "Wild Age." And even those beach kids who vagabond around in the zebra-striped hearse could catch the cold sting of truth in it.

Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School could be Zevon's best album. Certainly, it's the best-sounding record he's ever done, with supple guitar work by David Lindley and drumming by Rick Marotta that gives no quarter. There are various instrumental guest appearances – by Jackson Browne and Joe Walsh most strikingly–and string arrangements by Warren Zevon that show, as clearly as anything ever has, the results of his adolescent pilgrimages up behind the Whisky a Go to visit Igor Stravinsky. Included are several string-section meditations–a brief introduction and two "Interludes" – that might be fragments of Zevon's much-rumored and long-promised symphony. This music isn't pompous, grandiose or meant to demonstrate that the artist can "rise above" rock & roll to more "serious" things. Rather, the interludes are exciting because they meld so nicely with the other compositions. "Interlude No. 2" courses easily into a hard, prideful little number about Montreal Expos pitcher Bill Lee. It does everyone proud – the master, the pupil and the baseball player.

But Zevon is trying for another kind of assimilation, too, one that doesn't come off quite as well. If the new LP drives harder than his previous work, it's partly because the singer (who coproduced with Greg Ladanyi) is attempting some sort of brash fusion between the soft steps of California rock and the ass-kicks of the tougher East Coast stuff. It's a heroic struggle and, like most heroic struggles, a losing proposition in the end. One of the album's finest numbers, "Bed of Coals" (a great chorus: "I'm too old to die young And too young to die now"), is featherbedded into a typically Southern California, pseudohick country style. The lyric is a powerful confessional, yet the arrangement wants to make you cry in your suds.

Zevon's other excursion into rural matters, "Play It All Night Long," is a rousing rocker that collides with the other side of the same problem, emerging in one piece but pretty crumpled. Intended in part as a tribute to Lynyrd Skynyrd ("'Sweet Home Alabama'/Play that dead band's song") and partly as a venture into the mock-macho territory explored earlier in "I'll Sleep when I'm Dead," "Play It All Night Long" catalogs a series of surreal miseries perpetrated by a clan of yokel misfits much in the manner of Randy Newman's "Old Kentucky Home." But it misses Newman's irony and sidelong compassion by a country mile. Zevon's song falls victim to the very cliché it's trying to demolish. "There ain't much to country living Sweat, piss, jizz and blood" sounds like something the primally evil Rath brothers in John Irving's The World according to Garp should be shouting while they fuck animals in the barnyard. Cut the white-hot playing here–by Lindley, Marotta, Leland Skylark on bass and Zevon on string synthesizer – tempers the trouble, pulls the track back from the brink and closes side one with a somewhat equivocal exclamation mark that the first cut on side two turns into a bullet and lets fly.

"Jeanie Needs a Shooter," written with Bruce Springsteen, is a Freudian Western about love, betrayal and what seems like incest: a rock & roll redraft of King Visor's Duel in the Sun. Cowboy songs just won't sound the same anymore. (For archivists only: Warren Zevon had heard about an old, unrecorded Springsteen composition called "Jamie Needs a Shooter." The title, jiggered, stuck with him. Zevon composed all the music for his version, did the arranging and wrote the first verse of the lyrics. Bruce Springsteen contributed the rest of the words, presumably including the plot line, which bears no resemblance to the original.)

If "Jeanie Needs a Shooter" is the record's scariest narrative, the shaggy-ape shenanigans of "Gorilla, You're a Desperado" are no less personal for being fanciful. Zevon uses the gorilla as an autobiographical surrogate, sending the simian off on an unsentimental journey through the recent events of his life. The song is brash, jaunty and funny, yet it lingers in a way that, say, "Werewolves of London" didn't. "Gorilla" will make you laugh, but it's no joke.

"Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School" makes clear that the dancer-protagonist has been performing on broken glass all along. It starts with the sound of two shots from a .44 Magnum, an appropriately sardonic approximation of the dancing master's handclaps that begin a class. The track serves as an invocation, a revelation, a dare, and even Zevon seems to back off a bit after it. The next two cuts – a version of Ernie K. Doe's "A Certain Girl" that sounds both sinister and ironic, and the fever dream of "Jungle Work"–circle the themes the title tune lays down: "Down on my knees in pain ... /Pauline, I swear I'll change." Then "Empty-Handed Heart" comes to grips with these themes so directly, and so shatteringly, that you're surprised the LP can go on from there.

"Empty-Handed Heart" is Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School's core, its centerpiece: a ballad that's apparently addressed to Zevon's ex-wife. It's full of love, apology, terrifying challenge ("Trying to separate the real thing/From the wishful thinking") and a kind of bleak, proud resolve that makes it as heartbreaking to hear as it must have been to live through. The song starts as a monologue, and suddenly becomes a dialogue. Linda Ronstadt sings a descant that underscores with reverie and accusation what Zevon is singing about with regret. The memories Ronstadt evokes–watching the sun set in the sea, making love in the morning–seem like sentimental snapshots, shards of the past filled with unguarded longing. Like a gentle tide, the sweet, brook-water clarity of her voice flows around the vaunting and complex harmonies of the melody. But then you hear the pity and the vast anger just beneath the surface. These are weapons, not memories: the past used as a blunt instrument. The descant moves way past teary counterpoint and becomes a woman's act of desperation. Even at this short distance, "Empty-Handed Heart" sounds like a classic, one of Zevon's finest numbers, and one of his most direct.

Like the album, "Empty-Handed Heart" is a benediction to an old life and the beginning of a new one. Bad Luck Streak in Dancing School is a hard-fought record. That's what makes Warren Zevon hard-boiled, like Ross Macdonald, Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett. Not the posture or the gunplay or the scars. It's the willingness to peel the scar tissue, to stand without it and go for more, that makes these men tough. And makes them great. All of them.